Sharks are older than trees, dinosaurs, and Saturn's rings

Sharks are a deep-time success story so old it scrambles the usual order of things. Their lineage reaches back at least 400 million years, with fossil scales from shark ancestors dated to over 420 million years ago, in the Silurian. By any reasonable measure, sharks are one of the oldest groups of large animals still swimming.

That antiquity beats some landmarks you’d assume came first. The earliest true trees didn’t appear until roughly 385 million years ago, in the Devonian — so when the first sharks evolved, dry land had little more than mosses and low, leafless plants. Sharks predate forests.

They also comfortably predate the dinosaurs, whose ancestry begins around 230 million years ago — well over 100 million years after sharks were already established predators. Sharks then survived the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs entirely.

They are even older than the rings of Saturn.

That last comparison sounds absurd, but it holds. Data from NASA’s Cassini mission indicate Saturn’s bright rings formed only 10 to 100 million years ago — astronomically recent. The planet is 4.5 billion years old, yet its signature rings are younger than sharks. An animal that outlasted forests, dinosaurs, and five mass extinctions has been around longer than one of the solar system’s most famous features.